Twins still popular after all these years

Sunday

Feb 17, 2013 at 6:00 AMFeb 17, 2013 at 9:47 AM

By Dianne Williamson

As the morning team on radio station WSRS, Greg Byrne and Heidi West like to post cute pictures on the station's Facebook page — babies, kids, cuddly kittens. Standard Facebook fare, the pictures typically attract a few dozen “likes” and comments from appreciative fans.

“Sometimes we may get up to 100 likes, if my dog was particularly cute that day,” Byrne noted.

One recent morning, West was scrolling pictures on Google and stumbled on a photo too adorable to resist. So she posted it on the station's Facebook page, and the picture immediately attracted several “likes.” Ten minutes went by, and more “likes” followed.

“Then they just kept coming,” West recalled. “They didn't stop. I was completely shocked.”

The photo, accompanied by a brief narrative, shows tiny twin girls in an incubator. The twins were born 12 weeks premature. They're lying on their bellies, and the slightly larger baby has her stick-thin arm around her sister.

“One baby was not expected to live,” reads the narrative. “A hospital nurse fought to put them in the same incubator. The stronger baby wrapped her arm around her sister, and her touch allowed the struggling baby's heart to stabilize and her temperature to return to normal.”

The picture has received a whopping 108,438 “likes” on Facebook, along with almost 5,000 comments and more than 12,274 shares.

But if Byrne and West were stunned by the photo's enormous appeal, they were even more surprised when they learned that the twins were born right here in Worcester, at UMass Memorial Hospital, known then as The Medical Center of Central Massachusetts — Memorial. The girls are now 17 years old and living in Westminster.

“I couldn't believe that this is actually a local story,” West said. “I had no idea. People have just clung on to this picture.”

As noted, she had no idea. The iconic photo of Kyrie and Brielle Jackson, snapped in 1995 by Telegram & Gazette photo editor Chris Christo, became a national sensation years before “viral” images would invade the Internet. It appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world, was the subject of a full-page spread in Life magazine, and was purchased by countless doctors' offices and clinics. The media clamor was so intense that the twins' parents, Heidi and Paul Jackson, had to change their telephone number.

“We've joked with the girls that their 15 minutes of fame came when they were a week old,” Paul Jackson said last week. “They blew it.”

But while the media frenzy has dissipated over the years, it hasn't died. Several years ago, a news team from South Korea came to Westminster to film the twins, and CNN showed up at the house this past December.

The nurse who put the twins in the same incubator still works at UMass Memorial, in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Gayle Kasparian said two details of the story have been sensationalized on the Internet. She didn't “fight” to place the babies in the same incubator — she simply asked the parents if it was OK. And the smaller twin, Brielle, was never at death's door.

But the baby weighed just 2 pounds. She was struggling with her heart rate and was blue-faced from crying.

“When I put Brielle in with her sister, it was amazing,” Kasparian recalled. “She immediately calmed down. Her heart rate stabilized and her color changed.” Since then, nurses have used the simple “double bedding” technique on other premature twins and triplets. Previously, premature siblings had been kept in separate incubators to reduce the risk of infection.

Today, the Jackson twins are happy, healthy juniors at Oakmont Regional High School. They're identical twins, although one is left-handed and one is right-handed. And they share a bedroom, albeit not an incubator.

“They get along really, really well, and they're each other's best friends,” Paul Jackson said.

The twins' two-month stay at Memorial would change the course of their mother's life. Before their birth, Heidi Jackson had little interest in health issues or medicine. But after the twins came home, she went to nursing school, got her license and is now an emergency room nurse at Heywood Hospital in Gardner.

A reunion of sorts is in the works. Kasparian never saw the twins again once they left the hospital, and hasn't seen the parents in years. West of WSRS has contacted the Jacksons, and they readily agreed to meet with Kasparian for an on-air interview.

“I'm just so happy that I stumbled across this,” West said. “It's such a feel-good story.”